Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262)
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Student nurses then lived in dorms that were much like convents. They were not allowed to marry. The Air Force Academy’s cadet corps was restricted to single men. In 1962, Carol and Nolan gave up their career dreams to marry each other. They moved to Beloit, Wisconsin, the following year so that Nolan could accept a job in a furniture store. Carol found work as a hospital nursing assistant, and Nolan discovered that his friendly, low-key personality was perfect for selling furniture. As their childhood dreams of nursing and flying faded, the couple slipped into a small-town life that revolved around work, church, community groups, and neighbors. They bought a small house and hoped to fill it with their children. Alas, after four years of marriage, Carol learned that she would never conceive. The couple began looking for a baby to adopt.
Their lives were interrupted by the war in Vietnam. Although he was married, and past the age when most men were drafted, Black was also childless and therefore vulnerable to the draft. In 1966, after learning that he would soon be called up, he enlisted in the Army. After basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, he went to Fort Rucker, Alabama, for training as a helicopter crew chief. After graduation, with Carol in tow, he went to Fort Hood, Texas, for duty. Several months later, Nolan was accepted for flight training and the couple moved again, first to Fort Wolters and then back to Fort Rucker, where in June 1968 Black graduated as a helicopter pilot and warrant officer. On that same day, the post chaplain notified the couple that a young, unmarried expectant mother had decided to give her baby up for adoption.
A few months later, while at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, their quest for parenthood was realized by the adoption of Laura Kristina, their new daughter.
In January 1969, Black shipped out for Vietnam for duty with the 4th Battalion, 77th Artillery, in the 101st Airborne Division. Four months later, he was transferred to the 155th AHC, where he and Gay first became acquainted. Later, he followed Gay to the 48th.
“Blackie was a good man, a good pilot, and a real family guy,” recalls Ben Gay. “When he first got into gunships, he flew with me a lot as copilot. When he took his helmet off, there was a picture of his wife and daughter in there.”
Another 155th pilot was tall, slim, fair, movie-star handsome Les Davison, an Illinois farm boy. He was born into a family of fliers: “My dad flew off carriers [in World War II] and my uncle flew fighters in the China/Burma/India Theater. Another uncle became a pilot but just at the war’s end.” After graduating from high school in 1965, he went to college for two years before he realized that he was wasting his time. He was 20, the draft was conscripting almost all able-bodied men his age, and he realized that without a student deferment, he was going to Vietnam. “I didn’t want to walk through the jungle,” he says. “I thought that flying over the jungle would be a better idea, so I talked to the Air Force, Navy, and Army. The Air Force and Navy required a degree to fly.” He graduated flight school “the day after Joe Namath won the Super Bowl” in January 1969. After more training at Fort Rucker, he left for Vietnam in March with around 200 hours of helicopter flight time.
His tour with the 155th began in March 1969 by flying slicks, as most new pilots did. By September, thanks to a couple of pilots getting wounded and sent home, he flew gunship copilot for only a month before becoming an aircraft commander. After a couple of months of flying the trail ship in a two-bird fire team, he became a team leader in the gunship platoon, call sign “Falcon 2.” He was still a Warrant Officer One, the lowest grade. And at dusk on October 29, at what he supposed was the end of a long, hard, day of flying, Davison was at back at BMT, refueling his gunship for the fifth time that day—he had been in the air since dawn, landing only to refuel and rearm. “Our asses were dragging,” he recalls. “The last thing I wanted to hear was my call sign on the radio.”
The act followed the thought: His radio crackled to life, and minutes later Davison was back in the air, trailed by Falcon 9, with WO2 Jack Coonce on the stick, and headed for an aerial rendezvous with Dustoff 63, the aerial ambulance that I hoped would take out some of my wounded. Hoped, because while the Geneva Conventions specified that ambulances and their crews were noncombatants, PAVN gunners used the big red cross on a white background adorning each side of every Dustoff bird as an aiming point. Hoping to give Dustoff some breathing space, I requested a Spooky, but it would not be on station until 2230.
“Dustoff 63 was flown by WO2 Denny Harrell, a good pilot and a good friend,” Davison says. Twilight was long gone by the time Davison, Coonce, and Harrell flew past Duc Lap. “There was a little horizon, but not much,” Davison recalls. “It happened so gradually we didn’t notice—and then it was just all gray outside and the rotating beacon [on top of each Huey] was flashing off the gray back into the cockpit.”
Startled, Davison called to Coonce to move away. “Break left Falcon 9, we’re in the soup,” he radioed. “We’re coming around to the right on instruments.” He told his copilot, Bob Maddox, to turn off the beacon and watch the instruments with him. “I hadn’t done this since flight school,” he said, and told Dave Nachtigall, his crew chief, and door gunner Cal Serain to watch for ground reference. After a long, nervous minute or so, the flight broke out of the fog. “I never knew you could start sweating so quickly,” he says.
After climbing above the clouds, Davison’s Falcon 2 rejoined Falcon 9 and headed west. “Now we started to see patchy ground fog forming, and it was getting thicker as we flew on. I can’t speak for the others, but I was certainly . . . on edge,” Davison recalls.
Twenty minutes later, the Falcons and Dustoff were orbiting Kate. From my bunker I could hear them, but we couldn’t see each other: Kate was shrouded in fog. I called the Dustoff pilot and told him that it had been fairly quiet since sundown—just a few mortars and some sporadic small arms, mainly from the west. A little earlier, our listening post on Ambush Hill had been hit, and our strikers were bringing in a badly wounded man. It would take a while to get him in; with that man we had five wounded for pickup.
By the time he was back with us, however, Davison’s fuel was so low that he was almost ready to abort. Instead, Davison and Coonce put Dustoff between them, Dustoff blacked out, the Falcons lit up their beacons, and all three birds swooped down through the fog toward us. The Falcon gunships leveled off and Dustoff continued its descent.
“Denny hovered down Kate’s [landing pad] light! The stuff those Dustoff guys did was unbelievable,” Davison adds. “We listened as a Special Forces type talked the Huey in to the LZ.
“A few seconds after touchdown, we heard [the Special Forces man] scream into the radio, ‘Incoming mortars! Get out, Dustoff!’
“Bob [Maddox] flipped our Master Arm switch to ‘Hot’ and over the intercom confirmed that we were ready to shoot,” Davison says. But after a quick radio check, it seemed that no one on either of the gunships had seen a tube flash through the fog. Without targets to attack, they could only wait.
Fearing that the mortars would hit at any moment, Davison silently urged Denny to take off. Davison’s radio blared: “Dustoff 63 coming out to the east!” Denny’s usual mellow baritone had somehow been transformed into a squeaky soprano.
As Denny cleared Kate, three mortar rounds landed at the south end of the hilltop, orange flashes biting back the darkness for an instant.
Nelson Koon was just then standing near the wire at that end of our perimeter, unbuttoning his fly. But let him tell it: “I had to take a whiz real bad, so I stood up and three mortars landed maybe ten meters away in a perfect triangle formation. It was like the war had stopped—I was peeing and watching the mortars explode. I didn’t get hit—and I’m thinking, WOW, that’s kind of cool. Then the medic threw me on the ground, and I’m pissing all over myself, and I say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
“He said, ‘Are you trying to get yourself killed?’
“I said, ‘No, I’m trying to take a leak.’”
High abov
e this earthy comedy, the aerial drama continued.
“Falcons are at 2,500 feet directly overhead, watching for you,” Davison called.
“We’re breaking out, 2, coming up bright flash,” Denny replied.
“Contact,” Davison came back. “Are you going to try again?”
“Don’t have to. We got ’em.”
“You picked up five in that time?” Davison was incredulous.
“Yep, those guys down there have got their sierra together. Let’s go home.”
As the shriek of three jet turbines faded to silence, I radioed my thanks to Denny and his crew. The mortars continued for a bit. Koon changed his pants.
By the time the Falcon gunships made it back to BMT, they had been flying for twenty minutes with the “low fuel” light on, expecting their engines to quit at any moment: There was probably more moisture in Koon’s shorts than in Falcon 2’s fuel tank. But both gunships landed safely. I never got a chance to thank those Falcon gunship crews, so I do so now.
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
—Mary Elizabeth Frye
TEN
“I spent the night of the 29th in the generator pit, on the radio with Spooky and Shadow, the gunships,” John Kerr recalls. “I enjoyed that; we had really good support that night. At dawn on the 30th, as soon as the last gunship left, incoming fire resumed. Then it was Albracht and me sitting in his foxhole and kind of staring at each other, as if to say, What are we going to do now?”
As soon as that barrage began, I started preparing to defend against a ground attack. The night before, I had sent a coded message requesting more reinforcements, lots of ammunition, and water; we were running low on everything.
The incoming paused again about 0930—and the shit hit the fan: I was with Hopkins walking the perimeter, and as we approached the very steep southeastern quadrant, I saw movement below.
“We saw some people down there, and he called in air support,” Hopkins recalls. “I remember watching the bomb going down there and the concussion wave coming back—wow! That is really something to see!”
I didn’t know it at the time, but some of the digging noises we’d heard the two previous nights were PAVN troops cutting steps in the hard-packed clay of the steep hillside. Now several hundred PAVN burst out of the jungle and started up toward us, firing rifles and machine guns—the big block party I’d been expecting was on. We responded with our own small arms, but plainly the three dozen CIDG riflemen on that flank would soon be overwhelmed by what looked to be at least a PAVN battalion.
I called our FAC, and he vectored some F-100 Super Sabres in to work over the ridge and the ravine between us with 500-pound bombs.
After a few passes, the fast movers pulled out; instantly the tree line was ablaze with fire. With Hopkins, I jumped into a hole occupied by a couple of strikers and our medic, Doc. In a few minutes a quartet of Huey gunships arrived.
“Gunships would come in, they would strafe, we would pop up, we would shoot, they would come in, we would go down,” Hopkins says. “I got my timing off and I got peppered with some shrapnel on my arm. Some of the [fragments] bounced off, and the Yard next to me said, ‘I’m sticking with you, you numbah one!’ And I thought, If he knew how scared I am, he wouldn’t want to be close to me at all. And then Doc said, ‘Oh, you got a Purple Heart there,’ and I said, ‘Bullshit.’”
I called for more gunships to help stop the ground assault; with each passing minute, it seemed more and more a threat. My strikers fought bravely and well, but we were heavily outnumbered and soon my men were getting killed or wounded in their holes.
Our PAVN neighbors were really dug in on the east ridge. They’d also emplaced 37 mm anti-aircraft guns; as far as I’ve been able to tell, this was the first such deployment of that weapons system inside South Vietnam. Some of our aviator pals reported being hit by flak at 10,000 feet near Kate—well above small-arms range. It made their approaches to Kate even more hazardous.
Among the gunships that answered our call were two from the 48th AHC, the Jokers. With First Lieutenant Ken Ryder, a newly arrived replacement, as his copilot, Ben Gay, Joker 73, flew the command ship with twin rocket pods, each carrying 19 supersonic rockets with high-explosive warheads. His wingman was Nolan Black, Joker 85, with a seven-rocket pod and a minigun on each side of his ship. Black handled the weapons, while in the left seat WO2 Maury Hearne, 22, out of Norwalk, California, had the flight controls. Fair-skinned, athletic, and boy-next-door handsome, Hearne was outgoing, likable, and highly respected as an aviator by his fellow pilots. Behind them, each manning an M60 mounted in a side doorway, were Sergeant Clyde Canada, 21, of Canoga Park, California, and SP5 Douglas Hugh Lott, Jr., 23, of Columbus, Georgia. Black had trained as a crew chief before starting flight school—his copilot was trained as a helicopter mechanic. There was probably no better-trained or more capable Huey crew anywhere in Vietnam.
By the time they responded to my call for help, however, Gay and Black had already had a harrowing morning flying around Bu Prang Camp, which was under mortar attack. While refueling on the small strip outside the camp, their gunships were targeted—their cue to leave. Heavy with ordnance and fuel, Gay attempted takeoff from Bu Prang’s short, unimproved strip, but as he neared the end, his main rotor RPM dropped and his transmission oil temperature light glowed red, indicating that both transmission and engine were dangerously stressed. Gay aborted takeoff and tried twice more, each time with the same result. As he was revving his engines for a fourth attempt, his UHF radio crackled to life with a call from our FAC: Kate was under ground attack by a massive PAVN force and his fire team was needed at once.
“I made another takeoff run down the strip,” Gay recalls. “As we neared the end, our RPM dropped again, but I continued anyway; at the end of the strip was a low cliff, and as we fell off that, our airspeed rose, boosting rotor RPM.” That was enough to get airborne. Seconds later, using the same maneuver, Black followed. Together they flew toward Kate as fast as their redlined engines could haul them.
“When we came around the side of the hill, we were maybe fifty to seventy-five feet off the deck, which is almost touching the ground; they probably could’ve thrown a stick up into the rotor blades and taken us down,” Gay recalls.
“But I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: a huge mass of enemy troops, hundreds of guys swarming out of the jungle. Guns on the firebase were pumping beehive rounds out. This was World War II–type combat, not a guerrilla war with three or four guys shooting bolt-action guns. This was a toe-to-toe, eye-to-eye brawl.”
He immediately opened fire with rockets—momentarily forgetting that, as a safety measure, each must travel about a hundred meters before its warhead arms. “Normally when you fired a rocket, there were two bangs—the rocket breaking the sound barrier, then the warhead exploding. But my rockets did not explode—they simply hit the enemy soldiers,” Gay recalls.
Behind him, Black opened up with his miniguns, joined by Gay’s door gunners and his own, to bring down some of the attackers. Both ships circled back for a second pass, this time keeping enough distance to let their rockets arm. “We probably took three or four rounds, most of them through the rotor blades, one to the synchronized elevator, and one round went through the tail boom, but nothing in the cockpit area and no injuries,” Gay recalls.
That pass, and several that followed, sa
ved our bacon, saved everyone on Kate, by breaking the back of the PAVN attack. The survivors withdrew and the shelling resumed, though not as heavily as earlier.
I took stock of our ammo and found that we had very little left. And we had fired off all our claymore mines, usually to good effect. Even if we were to get more of these anti-personnel mines, there was so much incoming that I didn’t see how my men could leave cover to emplace them a safe distance below their fighting positions.
Several aircraft tried to bring us ammo, but each was driven off by intense fire.
Around noon there was a little break in the action. By now we were virtually out of water, and many of my strikers had only a couple of 20-round magazines left. While we redistributed what little ammo we had, I called again for resupply.
A 155th AHC slick loaded ammo and water on the Bu Prang airstrip, took off, and headed toward Kate. As it approached, it was riddled with small-arms fire, wounding two crewmen. The pilot wisely aborted the mission and limped back to Bu Prang.
Meanwhile, a 189th AHC UH-1H “H model Huey” slick flown by Jim “Herbie” Matlock, 21, and copilot Wilbur Guthrie, 27, had left BMT after picking up SP4 Pete Olsen, a Special Forces radio operator who needed a lift to Bu Prang. Tall and lanky, a volunteer from Tennessee, Matlock was only a few months out of flight school but by all accounts a superbly gifted pilot—and not a bit shy about it. He was not, technically, a command pilot as he hadn’t yet been so certified, but he was nevertheless in charge of this aircraft. Quiet, short, and dark, Guthrie had already completed a combat tour in Vietnam as an enlisted door gunner; during the Tet Offensive, he’d manned an M60 from an airfield bunker. After rotating Stateside, he reenlisted for flight school. Returning to Vietnam in early October 1969, he joined the 189th at Camp Holloway, Pleiku. Three weeks later, on extended loan to the 155th, he and Matlock were flying ash-and-trash missions in support of Special Forces camps.